Cultural GrAnt: um protocolo de roteamento baseado em inteligência coletiva para redes tolerantes a atrasos

Abstract

This work presents a new routing protocol for complex and dynamic Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN). The proposed protocol is called Cultural GrAnt (Greedy Ant), as it uses a hybrid system composed of a Cultural Algorithm and a greedy version of the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) metaheuristic. In Cultural GrAnt, ACO represents the population space of the cultural algorithm and uses a greedy transition rule to either exploit previously found good paths or explore new paths by selecting, among a set of candidates, the most promising message forwarders. The main motivation for using ACO is to take advantage of its population-based search and adaptive learning framework. Conversely, CA gathers information during the evolutionary process and uses it to guide the population and thus accelerate learning while providing more efficient solutions. Considering information from heuristic functions, pheromone concentration, and knowledge stored in the CA belief space, the Cultural GrAnt protocol includes three modules: routing, scheduling, and buffer management. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first routing protocol that employs both ACO and CA to infer the best message forwarders using opportunistic information about social connectivity between nodes, determine the best paths a message must follow to eventually reach its destination while limiting message replications and droppings, and perform message transmission scheduling and buffer space management. Cultural GrAnt is compared to the Epidemic and PROPHET protocols in two different mobility scenarios: an activity-based movement model, which simulates the daily lives of people in their work, leisure and rest activities; and a community-based movement model. Simulation results obtained by the ONE simulator show that, in both scenarios, Cultural GrAnt achieves a higher delivery ratio, lower message replication, and fewer dropped messages than Epidemic and PROPHET.